Chapter 16 #2
Doug and Amelia were waiting for us when we rolled up to the great circular entranceway, Doug in a button-down shirt rolled up at the elbows, Amelia in a collared shirtdress.
Not a wrinkle between the two of them. Like a pair of vintage figurines, Mr. and Mrs. America positioned just so in front of the massive double-entrance oak doors.
The car rolled to a stop, and they approached us with matching grins.
Doug opened the passenger door for me, and I turned to him with the biggest, fakest smile I could muster.
“Look who made it!” Doug roared.
“Where’s my gorgeous little grandbaby?” Amelia exclaimed.
Clementine was half-awake when I opened the back-seat door.
I unbuckled and pulled her out of the car seat with all the care and precision of a bomb-disarming expert.
To my amazement, she performed perfectly for the moment, gazing up at her grandparents with a little twinkle in her usually miserable dark eyes.
I stared down at my daughter with a new measure of respect.
“You sure can make a mean baby, Natalie,” Doug said.
Before I could reply, Amelia lifted Clementine out of my arms. “That’s a darling little girl, yes, ma’am.
” Then she looked up at me, her face a veneer of hostess perfection.
Pink-painted lips, eyebrows plucked into a perfect bridge.
“You must be exhausted, Natalie. Let’s get you a cold glass of water, then I’ll have Maria make you a cappuccino.
You’ll love Maria. She’s an absolute godsend. ”
(As it would turn out, I would never actually get to know Maria at all. The employees at the Mills estate were trained to be discreet, which meant that they optimized their work schedules such that they were practically invisible to me throughout the day.)
Caleb slammed the car door shut. The three of us looked over at him.
“Hello, Mother,” he said formally. “Hello, Father.”
Caleb walked around the car and stood there, arms limp by his sides as Doug gave him a bear hug. He stared blankly at me over his father’s shoulder, as if to say, Are you happy now?
But Caleb’s parents seemed unbothered by his gloom.
As we walked inside, I fell a few steps behind the three of them and watched as Doug and Amelia talked at him simultaneously, his mother relaying the latest gossip with the neighbors while his father brayed about how lazy the new garden workers were.
“—couldn’t honestly understand why she would send little Richard to a boarding school at such a young age—”
“—caught ’em napping at lunch time, snoring, can you believe it—?”
I could practically see Caleb wilting with each step he took farther into the house. He looked like a houseplant getting tortured with a hair dryer.
“You’ve had such a long drive,” Amelia said to us. She was holding Clementine in the practiced crook of one arm. “Why don’t we get Luiz to take your bags upstairs?”
She rested a tentative hand on Caleb’s shoulder. He shrugged it off and said, “I can carry my own bags.”
“Not a problem,” she replied smoothly. “In the meantime—can I get you both something to drink? A seltzer or a coffee?”
Doug chimed in. “Pint of beer?”
Caleb’s face was a crumple of fury, but still he muttered, “A glass of milk would be nice.”
My expression was frozen in a debutante scream. Milk. My husband wanted milk. Beneath the artificial delight was a curdling feeling, a distinctly unsettling sense that I had unknowingly married and been impregnated by a toddler.
At the exact moment my mask fell, my father-in-law glanced over at me. His gaze was every bit as curious as his son’s was hostile. I could practically hear what he was thinking: Why did you marry my son?
How to answer that question.
Natalie’s like a border collie, my mother used to say to the other women at church. She needs a project, otherwise she starts chewing the cabinet corners.
Are you saying my son is a project? I imagined Doug saying.
No, I imagined my mother replying. I’m saying he’s the cabinet corner.
The Mills estate was large and sparse and cold.
The hallways were so wide they felt academic in nature—a far cry from the corridors, which snaked alongside the hallways, no wider than three feet, to be used exclusively by Maria and Luiz and all the other godsends who worked at the estate.
Each room was painted in earth tones and contained about three fewer pieces of furniture than the space called for.
Amelia claimed that clutter gave her anxiety.
She also claimed that too much company at once (another form of clutter, I supposed) gave her anxiety, which meant we would only ever see Caleb’s brothers and their families at holidays, for a few days at a time—and even then, nearly everyone but us would retire in the evenings to one of the nearby four-star hotels, though there were more than enough rooms to house everyone at the estate.
Another left turn in my marriage: I’d thought I was marrying into a big, boisterous American family, but I would never actually get to know Caleb’s brothers, nor their wives or children, and they would never take an interest in me.
Years into our marriage, I would learn accidentally over a New Year’s celebration that the four other families went on vacations together, and this was when I realized that the strangely pungent anxiety radiating from the Mills family was not a universal stink, but rather one that was exclusively associated with Caleb and his mother.
After that, on the rare occasion all the families were together, I would watch how the four older brothers instinctually grouped themselves away from Caleb, showing their backs to him like puppies crowding out a sick runt, and I would wonder if this animal dynamic had happened the night of my engagement party.
Then, like a one-two punch, I would remember a strange, small detail of our wedding: Caleb hadn’t had a best man.
His brothers had sat in the front row with all the other guests.
On that first day, though, none of this was immediately clear to me. I carried Clementine into the bedroom where we would be staying. It was Caleb’s childhood bedroom, Amelia said, but it might as well have been a suite at the Ritz-Carlton, it was so decadent and anonymous.
“Welcome home,” I whispered to my daughter, once the door was shut and we were alone. I gave her a hopeful smile. She began to cry.
Reena was entering her junior year of college soon. That was what I thought about while I held my wailing child in my arms. This week—maybe today, even—marked the beginning of the fall semester. Back to class, I thought distantly.
I would never complete my degree.